A Qualitative Study with the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Southern Appalachian Community Members
Nicolette Cooley. 2004. Understanding Traditional Knowledge for Ecological Restoration: A Qualitative Study with the Eastern Band of Cherokee and Southern Appalachian Community Members. Masters Thesis, NAU School of Forestry.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Abstract
The primary objective of the research project, Understanding Traditional Knowledge for Ecological Restoration: A Qualitative Interview Study with Cherokee and Southern Appalachian Community Members, in North Carolina was to gather data concerning historical land management practices exemplified by traditional ecological knowledge and practices of the Cherokee Nation, specifically burning. This particular research project was established due to a collaborative effort between the Ecological Restoration Institute (ERI) at Northern Arizona University (NAU) and Coweeta Hydrological Laboratory in Otto, North Carolina. The study was designed to collect information about the fire history of the Southeast focusing on the region historically and currently occupied by the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (E.B.C.I) within a two year time frame.
Introduction
The use of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) of fire has been debated since the mid sixteenth century (Goodwin 1977) when non-Native American people viewed Indians as not being civilized enough to know the uses and effects of fire. This view brought about the belief that the Indians could not have had any significant influence on the environment (Kretch III 1999). The arrival of European explorers and settlers brought on a number of changes for the Indians and the land they occupied. Indians have brought on a number of changes for the Indians and the land they occupied. Indians have used fire to clear land for agriculture, improve visibility for hunting and traveling, and reduce the accumulation of fuels to prevent catastrophic wildfires (Noss 1983). Particularly in the Southern Appalachians Native Americans have been burning for agricultural and hunting purposes for 10,000 years (Keel 1976 in Van Lear and Waldrop 1989). Instead of acting as a destructive force, the Indians were acting as a functioning component of the ecosystem (Goodwin 1977). As a functioning component in the ecosystem, Native Americans were intentionally burning and cutting trees down because they knew burning and cutting created specific effects. For example, Goodwin describes how Indians burned forests to prevent uncontrolled fires, to clear heavy fuel loads, and undesirable weeds for cultivation. He goes on to discuss how Indians burned longleaf pine (Pinus palustrus) forests to eliminate brown-spot needle disease and competitive vegetation. Goodwin describes the importance of longleaf pine to build shelter, build canoes, and for firewood.
The Benefits of Forest Restoration
Mike Dubrasich. 2010. The Benefits of Forest Restoration. W.I.S.E. White Paper 2010-2. Western Institute for Study of the Environment.
Full text [here]
Restoration forestry aims to recover our nation’s forest heritage while also restoring the productive and harmonious relationship between people and forests that existed in historic forests. Restoration forestry is a vision for the future rooted in respect for the past. — Dr. Thomas M. Bonnicksen, Protecting Communities and Saving Forests–Solving the Wildfire Crisis Through Restoration Forestry.
FOREST restoration means active management to bring back historical cultural landscapes, historical forest development pathways, and traditional ecological stewardship to achieve historical resiliency to fire and insects and to preclude and prevent a-historical catastrophic fires that decimate and destroy myriad resource values.
Forest restoration is beneficial to man and nature in numerous ways. The following describes these benefits in general.
1. Heritage and history
To restore means to return to a former or original state. In the case of forests, restoration requires knowledge of and respect for forest history as a starting point. Forest restoration looks to pre-Contact forest conditions as a guideline.
Many (if not most) North American forests were at one time (prior to ~120 years ago) open and park-like, with widely spaced, large, old trees. Forests were conditioned to be that way by frequent, non-stand-replacing, anthropogenic fires. Historical human features included village sites; sacred and ceremonial sites; hunting, gathering, agricultural and proto-agricultural fields; extensive trail networks; prairies and savannas; and other features induced and maintained by ancient human tending through the use of traditional ecological knowledge.
Forest restoration, properly researched, designed, and implemented, restores, protects, and perpetuates many of the heritage features of forested landscapes.
Friendly Fire
Stephen J. Pyne. 2007. Friendly Fire.
Full Text [here]
Stephen J. Pyne, World’s Foremost Authority on fire and one this country’s finest writers on any subject, has done it again.
His recent essay Friendly Fire is a compelling review of the Warm WFU (Wildland Fire Use fire) and it’s effect on forests. For the entire essay download from Steve Pyne’s Commentaries site [here] (click on Friendly Fire [pdf] - Wally Covington and the 2006 Warm fire).
For background on the Warm Whoofoo see [here].
Selected excerpts from Friendly Fire by Stephen J. Pyne:
“If I were the Prince of Darkness, I could not have devised a better way to destroy the Kaibab Plateau.”
Wally Covington, professor, restoration ecologist, and a man who has been around burned woods all of his career, walked through the still-raw scar of a fire that had wiped out nine nesting reserves for the northern goshawk, shut down the only roads to the plateau, including one to Grand Canyon’s North Rim, threatened a substantial chunk of the remaining habitat of the flammulated owl and endemic Kaibab squirrel, may cause a quarter of the old-growth ponderosa pine to die, promoted gully-washing erosion, and rang up suppression costs of $7 million.
To help pay those bills the Forest Service initially proposed to salvage log some 17,000 acres of the burn, which has sparked promises of monkey-wrenching by local environmental activists. When trotted out before cameras after the blowup, the district Fire Staff Officer declared that if he knew then what he knew now, he would have made exactly the same decisions. Fire belonged on the land. This was an inevitable fire, a necessary fire, a good fire.
Wally Covington thought it testified to ideology gone mad, and had the temerity to say so and the clout to be heard.
I was there because I wanted to come home. Forty years before, in June, 1967, I had begun my own career in fire on the North Rim. Only five years previously had the opening salvo in fire’s great cultural revolution sounded. By my second summer the National Park Service had rewritten its policy to encourage more fire on its lands. I wanted to see what that revolution had wrought. …
William Wallace Covington, Regents professor at Northern Arizona University and Director of the Ecological Restoration Institute, was a child of the Sixties. Born in 1947, the middle of three sons, he was raised in Wynnewood, Oklahoma. His father, a jack-of-all-trades from prizefighter to radio announcer to barnstorming pilot, was above all an ardent woodsman, a one-time forester, who got himself and his sons where they could camp, hunt, and fish as often as possible. …
By the mid-1970s that was the collective wisdom of the day: fire had to reenter the landscape. The tricky issue was how. The National Park Service formally revised its policies in 1968. The Forest Service stepped through a sequence of half measures, allowing some wilderness fires in 1972, publicly converting in 1974 to the doctrine that fire management had to serve land management, and adopting a formal policy of fire by prescription in 1978. But ideas were easy. Implementation was tough, as both agencies struggled to make philosophy practical. The American public became rudely aware of what was happening when Yellowstone burned through the summer of 1988. Apologists cleverly framed the ensuing outcry by debating whether fire belonged in Yellowstone; that was easy, of course it did. What they avoided was the gist of the operational issue, how and at what cost and under what social compact should fire belong? Even as the NPS burned up $130-300 million (no one knows exactly how much) while failing to control the fires, the Park Service and its apologists managed to skip over the point where the philosophical rubber hit the road of real-world ecology. The agency was, it claimed, only doing what came naturally.
It was exactly this issue that the fire community has never resolved within itself. The revolution, like a bar magnet, had two poles that held the fractious particles within a common force field. The poles were bicoastal. One resided in Florida, focused on the Tall Timbers Research Station and the charismatic Ed Komarek; a sense of fire as used on private land, fire as historical and cultural, fire as a means to promote biotic assets, whether longleaf pine, bobwhite quail, or open-woods cattle. The other pole centered on the national parks of the Sierra Nevada, with its intellectual anchor in the University of California–Berkeley and its focus on public lands, and for its prophets such wildlife and rangeland professors as Starker Leopold and Harold Biswell. The Florida faction wanted fire in the hands of people; the California cohort, as far as possible, left to nature. Behind the wilderness model was the expectation that, while prescribed fire might be necessary as an expedient, the agencies would ultimately surrender their colonial oversight to the indigenous processes of nature. Prescribed fire was an expedient, to be succeeded by natural fire as possible. …
Unfortunately, putting fire back has proved more daunting than taking it out. Shortly after arriving in Flagstaff, Wally was working with Forest Service researchers keen to reinstate fire. They believed that reintroducing fire would be enough to clean out the clotted understory that choked the land like woody plaque. Plots were laid out, burned, and assessed. But everyone knew the results could only be good. After a few years, however, the field trials showed outcomes that were the exactly opposite of what had been predicted: loosed fires had killed few of the young trees without burning them up, while slow-cooking fires had girdled the bases of the old-growth ponderosa – the fabled yellow pine – two-thirds of which died over the next ten years. This was not what agencies wanted to hear. The Forest Service had just completed its painful conversion away from fire’s suppression to a doctrine of fire by prescription. Wally’s agency cooperators demanded he surrender his data on old-growth tree mortality since his work was under contract and hence the property of the Forest Service. The results, while obvious to anyone who visited the sites, were not published until 25 years later.
S. 2593 - The Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008
Linked below are suggested amendments to S. 2593, the Forest Landscape Restoration Act of 2008 and an explanatory letter. These documents were crafted by members of the Western Institute for Study of the Environment.
Suggested Amendments [here]
Explanatory letter [here]
The Jim’s Creek Savanna Restoration Project
Stand Diagnosis of Treatment Needs, Silvicultural Prescription, and Silvics Background Paper (Effects Analysis) — Jim’s Creek Savanna Restoration Project
by Tim Bailey, Middle Fork Ranger District, Willamette National Forest, August, 2005
Full text [here] (755KB)
Selected excerpts and some thoughts by Mike Dubrasich
Two hundred years ago the upper reaches of the Willamette River were occupied by the Molalla Indians. They may have been relative newcomers; it is conjectured that before the 1700’s the Kalapuya Indians controlled that area. In any case, evidence suggests that human beings lived in the Willamette Valley and adjacent Oregon Cascades for thousands of years.
The evidence is an oak savanna that extends deep into the mountains, including along the Middle Fork of the Willamette River above Oakridge. Today remnant old oaks, open-grown old-growth ponderosa pines, and tarweed (Madia spp) fields can still be seen, although a thicket of Douglas-fir has invaded in the last 100 years.
In 1984 an anthropologist named Carol Winkler did her Masters thesis on the ancient savannas of the Middle Fork. Later she teamed up with an intrepid USFS forester/silviculturalist named Tim Bailey, and together they resolved to restore the savanna, fields, and open pine forest of the Willamette Molallas.
In 2002 they presented a paper, Restoring the Cultural Landscape At Jim’s Creek: Challenges to Preserving a Spirit of Place, at the 55th Annual Northwest Anthropological Conference, Eugene, Oregon. April 11-13, 2002.
Testimonies to the US Senate Regarding Forest Restoration, 13 Dec 2007
Testimonies to the US Senate Energy & Natural Resources Subcommittee on Public Lands and Forests: To receive testimony regarding forest restoration and hazardous fuels reduction efforts in the forests of Oregon and Washington (Hearing Room SD-366), Thursday, December 13, 2007.
Mark Rey - Natural Resources and the Environment: Department of Agriculture [here]
James Caswell - Director, Bureau of Land Management [here]
K Norman Johnson - University Distinguished Professor, Oregon State University, and Jerry F. Franklin - Professor of Ecosystems Sciences, College of Forest Resources, University of Washington [here]
Phil Aune - USFS (ret), former Research Program Mgr, Redding Silviculture Lab [here]
Russ Vaagen - Vice President, Vaagen Brothers Lumber Co. [here]
Matthew Donnegan - Co-President, Forest Capital Partners, LLC [here]
Russ Hoeflich - Vice President & Oregon State Director, The Nature Conservancy [here]
Boyd Britton - County Commissioner, Grant County, Oregon [here]
Michael E. Dubrasich - Executive Director Western Institute for Study of the Environment [here]
Covington Testimony July 16, 2002
Testimony of Dr. William Wallace Covington, regarding the Wildland Firefighting and National Fire Plan, before the US Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee
Tuesday, July 16, 2002
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Chairman Bingaman, and members of the Committee, thank you for this opportunity to testify on a subject of personal importance to me and of critical importance to the health of our nation’s forests and the people and communities that live within them.
My name is Wallace Covington. I am Regents’ Professor of Forest Ecology at Northern Arizona University and Director of the Ecological Restoration Institute. I have been a professor teaching and researching fire ecology and restoration management at NAU since 1975. I chair Arizona Governor Jane Dee Hull’s Forest Health/Fire Plan Advisory Committee and am a member of the National Commission on Science for Sustainable Forestry.
I have a Ph.D. in forest ecosystem analysis from Yale University and an M.S. in ecology from the University of New Mexico. Over the past 27 years I have taught graduate and undergraduate courses in research methods, ecological restoration, ecosystem management, fire ecology and management, forest management, range management, wildlife management, watershed management, recreation management, park and wildland management, and forest operations research. I have been working in long-term research on fire ecology and management in ponderosa pine and related ecosystems since I moved to Northern Arizona University in 1975. In addition to my publications on forest restoration, I have co-authored scientific papers on a broad variety of topics in forest ecology and resource management including research on fire effects, prescribed burning, thinning, operations research, silviculture, range management, wildlife effects, multiresource management, forest health, and natural resource conservation.
My testimony will focus on the implementation of the National Fire Plan and the urgent need to increase the pace and size of forest restoration treatments to reverse the trend of increasing catastrophic wildfires. I will outline a three-step approach to help achieve this goal…
It is an unfortunate set of circumstances that have led to this hearing. Scientists have predicted the current forest crisis for the last 75 years. In 1994 I was senior author on a review paper in which I stated that we could anticipate exponential increases in the severity and extent of catastrophic fire. It is not a prediction I ever wanted to come true. In that same paper, I also suggested that we have a narrow window of 15-30 years to take preventative actions to restore forest health, minimize the loss of civilian and firefighter lives, and the mounting damage to our nation’s natural resources.
Protecting Communities And Saving Forests
Bonnicksen, Thomas M. Protecting Communities And Saving Forests–Solving the Wildfire Crisis Through Restoration Forestry. 2007. Published by the Forest Foundation [here].
Full Text and additional Restoration Forestry information [here]
Selected excerpts:
Restoration forestry is a vision for the future rooted in respect for the past. Thus, restoration forestry uses the historic forest as a model for the future forest. No scientist, forester, or environmental activist could conceive of more beautiful or diverse and sustainable forests, with more wildlife, than those found by the first European explorers. Restoration forestry aims to recover our nation’s forest heritage while also restoring the productive and harmonious relationship between people and forests that existed in historic forests.
Restoration forestry is defined as restoring ecologically and economically sustainable forests that are representative of landscapes significant in America’s history and culture. These forests also should serve society’s contemporary need for wood products and other forest values.
The goal of restoration forestry is to restore and sustain, to the extent practical, a forest to a condition that resembles, but does not attempt to duplicate, the structure and function of a reference historic forest. The term “reference historic forest” means the way a whole forest appeared spreading over a landscape, with all of its diversity, at or about the time it was first seen by European explorers.
The forests explorers found provide the most scientifically sound reference historic forest for the United States. These reference historic forests were inherently sustainable and diverse, represented thousands of years of development and human uses, existed during a period with a similar climate, and are more easily documented than forests from an earlier time.
A reference historic forest does not represent a particular point in time. It represents a period and the variations in forest structure that characterized that period. The historic period for a reference forest varies by region because the age of exploration lasted several centuries, ending in the late eighteenth century.
